Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

Today's Google Chrome monopoly makes the Microsoft Internet Explorer monopoly of not all that long ago look like peanuts.

Anyway, memorize Get Firefox dotcom.

Also, on a positive tangent, the long since lost manual for my printer has a section on cleaning the lone faulty part: the pick-up roller. Thank the Internet Archive for preserving the needful things their makers don't.

https://archive.org/details/printermanual-hp-laserjet-1100-user-guide/mode/2up

What really blows my mind is that Unix & Linux can print to it just fine on brand new hardware because HP themselves wrote & released cups drivers for it.

https://www.openprinting.org/printer/HP/HP-LaserJet_1100

HP once made tanks for soho printers. Now they just make disposable hardware with quickly abandoned support.

has printed an average of 5 pages a day for 25 years & counting.

My latest Unix workstation can print to it just fine.

My latest Linux workstation can print to it just fine.

My latest Windows workstation can't print to it at all because a compatible driver doesn't exist. No compatible driver exists because HP removed downloads for Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, & 10, & Microsoft removed it from Windows Update for 10 & 11.

But if I downgrade to S2K3, XP, 2K, or NT4, I can print to it.

@taco Also, I dove straight into FreeBSD knowing it's not at all intended for dedicated or general desktop use. Like with your poll's base Linux distros, there are derivatives designed for different & specialized use cases. This DistroWatch search lists a few FreeBSD-based ones: https://distrowatch.com/search.php?basedon=FreeBSD

@taco Functionally identical to Linux on the desktop, though I use wmx & a heavily customized .xsession instead of a full DE like XFCE.

In the shell the differences between BSD & GNU commands took a bit of getting used to, but that was made up for by a complete & actually useful `man` system. I don't miss GNU `info` at all.

@taco When I used Linux, my preferences were Debian-based, & that was because of their deb & apt package management interfaces.

(I switched to FreeBSD to escape pulse-audio & systemd.)

@nixCraft Even fewer know about `xmore`. And those who do know tend not to use it because, unlike xless, you can't pipe to it (which is a shame, because xmore has a cleaner UI).

I don't know how I should feel about Google Maps having an incredible historical landmark marker at ICBM coordinates 36.372731, 139.058436: the site of a little-known (at the time) used PC & parts store that shuttered way back in '02.